Salem, Oregon – On December 30th, a group of Salem area residents filed an appeal of the City of Salem's urban growth boundary (UGB) expansion to construct a third Willamette River bridge to the state Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA)....

The eight co-petitioners are asking LUBA to reverse or remand the Council's decision.

"We're appealing the City's decision to expand the UGB for a third bridge because its a bad idea for Salem and because it violates local plans and state planning rules," said Robert Cortright, the group's spokesperson. "It's a bad idea because it's an expensive, unaffordable project that won't reduce traffic congestion and will destroy homes and businesses"....

The LUBA appeal will contend that the City's actions violate state planning laws because they failed to consider all alternatives to address peak hour traffic congestion problems. To justify a UGB expansion, local and state planning rules require that the City show a new bridge is the only reasonable way to meet future transportation needs. But the City's own plans and studies show that widening the existing bridges in combination with other actions, like expanding transit service and staggering work hours for state employees, would work as well in reducing congestion — and at a cost that would be hundreds of millions of dollars less than a third bridge.

There are several interesting details in them, and they might be worth your time. In some cases the details might complicate the urge to flatten things with over-simple narratives about need and meeting the need. (Humans are complicated!)

A couple of transportation things also stand out.

From the summary:

Census data shows that 18% of North Salem residents do not have access to a vehicle

The survey shows that 85% of respondents use their car get their groceries. However, 45% of respondents [also] use an alternative form of transportation, at least part of the time. About 18% walk.

Our nearly compulsory autoism creates real problems for people.

Making better conditions for walking and biking and busing isn't just about serving some car-skeptical elite. It's about serving a very large portion of our citizenry. It's about fairness.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Maybe it is the pessimissm and worry about our reactionary moment, or the loss of cultural giants like Bowie and Prince, but it's hard to see much to praise or to see positive patterns in 2016.

(Maybe you see something more optimistically?)

And much more than policy and ideas, which seemed especially insignificant this time, the year was about people and politics.

Elections

Although there is little to say here, the most important transportation stories of 2016 arise out of the National election in November and the City Council elections settled in May. The further resignation of another Councilor in November and the subsequent March 2017 election could decisively shape Council. Things seem likely to change on both local and national levels. If the Legislature can manage, 2017 might also bring a new funding package.

As with the SRC's part-whole problem, on walking safety while we mourn individual deaths, we do not look at the system and seek ways to curb our autoism and the deaths that result from it. We rationalize crashes as the result of bad actors or bad choices, but do not look at the ways our system increases the probability of catastrophe. The January City report was shelved, and did not create any policy reform.

Monday, December 26, 2016

It seems like the SRC has a real problem with part-whole relations, nearly always subordinating criticism of defective parts to overall assurances that the whole is wholesome and true.

Sometimes this might be warranted, but it also serves to insulate parts from any criticism at all. Looking at the entirely of the way this argument is deployed on several occasions, it seems clear it is a strategy to deflect reasonable criticism of the parts.

In a systematic way, too often on the SRC values don't scale, and the overall shape of the argument exploits discontinuities between the big picture and the details.

demonstrate[s] that the bicycle system improvements integrated in the Preferred Alternative will result in improvements to the overall bicycle element of the transportation system. This criterion is not intended to be used to judge the overall adequacy of the system in evaluating a single project.

But there is no such demonstration in Section 4.2.2.2 of the Findings Report. It simply asserts

The TSP Amendments supporting the Preferred Alternative are consistent with the goal for the bicycle system element. The new bridge crossing will include bicycle facilities on the bridge and connections to bicycle facilities in the bridgehead areas on both sides of the river and will enhance the overall connectivity of the bicycle system in support of the goals listed above. Amendments to the Bicycle Network Maps (7.1, 7-2, and 7-5) will show bicycle facilities on the new bridge and on ramps connecting Marine Drive to Edgewater Street. These facilities will be identified as high priority associated with the Preferred Alternative. Map 7-10 will also be amended to change the priority for the multi-use path along Marine Drive from Tier 2 to Tier 1.

There's no argument developed here. It just a bald-faced assertion that these new facilities "will enhance the overall connectivity."

Friday, December 23, 2016

Shall we flog the dead horse? It's hard to say what the next event may or may not be on the epic saga of the Salem River Crossing. Depending on what happens next, there might be more to say; or, also, any further thought right now might be utterly moot and irrelevant. But in the event there might be more to say, here are some thoughts.

In
the "Findings report" of October 4th, 2016, Section 4.2.1 (pp.162 -
172), two relevant policies from the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan seem to be omitted, Policy 11 and Policy 18.
The Findings discussion jumps from Policy 8 to 12 (pp. 166-167), and
again from Policy 17 to 19 (p. 168).

Local
governments within the Salem Urban Area shall develop multimodal plans,
services, and programs that decrease reliance on the SOV as the
dominant means of travel. Progress toward this objective shall be
monitored through benchmarks sets forth in Table #1

Policy 18 says:

The
Salem Transportation System Plan shall identify methods that employers
can use to better facilitate the commute of their employees, encourage
employees to use alternative travel modes other than the SOV, and
decrease their needs for off-street parking.

By
themselves these aren't killers or anything, and the other adjacent policies
are probably more important. Still, I would have expected the findings to reference
them, and I find the silence odd and worth noting.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Here's a nice thing to keep in the back of your mind for next month. Especially if you don't bike much or have a friend who doesn't, and one of you has a bike that's just sitting in the garage because something's broken on it, here's an opportunity to fix it. (It looks like there will be beer, too!)

They'll be moving from downtown to this cluster on "middle commercial." The forms here are suburban with big boxes, strip malls, and the big stroad. There's some legacy development from before that, but nothing left from the streetcar era. It's not very walkable.

There is in fact a key segment of missing sidewalk adjacent to their building on Commercial. And when the semi-couplet of Vista/Fairview were "improved" several years ago, the City striped no bike lanes. Biking and continuing south on Commercial through this area is challenging.

So this is going to be an interesting transition. Reporters will be more distant from City Hall and from the Capitol, so will there be even less coverage of city and state politics? With development picking up downtown, it is also a move away from an important center of economic and cultural activity.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Now that we've been able to go through some of the traffic modeling from around 1980 that supported the Front Street Bypass, the Salem Parkway, and the Mission Street Overpass, it's clear that there some pretty big misses. That points towards a systemic problem with the modeling.

On a comfortable majority of road segments, the projected year 2000 traffic volumes were meaningfully larger than actual traffic volumes measured mostly in the 2010s. Even when you look 30 years out instead of 20, the actual traffic still hasn't caught up to the projected numbers. (On a few segments actual traffic is higher, but these are the exception.)

Let's look at the biggest misses.

Wild overestimates:

Front Street bypass

High/Church in downtown

Cherry Street

Portland Road/Fairgrounds Road

Pine Street

17th Street

Center Street near 17th

12th Street

The Mission Street overpass itself

Big undercounts:

Liberty/Commercial in downtown

Front Street at River Road

25th Street north of Mission

Many of the other estimates are "in the ballpark" but slightly under actual counts; considering the actual counts here mostly are from the 2010s, not from year 2000, however, the general drift in nearly every case is that there was a system bias for overestimating traffic volumes for year 2000.

Documentation is scarce, but the Downtown Historic District materials claim the building was constructed circa 1915 and underwent extensive modification in the 60s. Formally it is classified a "historic, non-contributing" building.

The map of discarded alternatives is a little interesting. Some of them would have had much more impact on already developed areas. The route they chose, the "Railroad West," west of the railroad lines, probably did minimize impacts to existing development. But we forget the losses, especially the individual stories of people and families affected, down the memory hole. And now, in currently paused Kroc Center Study, we have contemplated millions for a bridge or other facilities to mend the gap we created.

Val Springer rediscovered the box in her garage not long ago. Inside were five large photo albums.

She intended to track down the family whose lives are chronicled on the pages, but didn’t know where to begin and never got around to it.

So she asked for my help.

I’ve had success reuniting people with family keepsakes — some 1930s letters between a father and daughter, a World War II service flag with the names of three brothers handwritten on it, and a World War II veteran’s wallet with precious family snapshots inside.

These albums deserve a home, too.

You can find more images and clues in the article. What is most interesting here are the bikes.

Two of the images they reproduce show bikes identified as circa 1897. They both show a woman, and even though she has a skirt, she appears to have a bike with a top tube, not a step-through. In one of them a man on her left does have a step-through.

Is this evidence of a moment before frame geometry was gendered? Is this evidence that the family or group didn't ride the bikes and instead were using them as props to show a kind of up-to-dateness? Bikes were expensive at this time, and still represented advanced transportation technology.

(click to enlarge for detail)
Are two of these in the photo below?

(detail of a photo of a photo on an angle in an album)
If these are the same two people, they've switched bikes

Urban real estate developers always ask for subsidies whether they need them or not, and cities often provide them even when they’re not needed. Why else would cities subsidize billion-dollar sports stadiums to house teams that are worth billions and that are owned by sports tycoons worth billions?

That’s why cities need to know a lot about the economics of private real estate development deals, specifically when and why projects pencil out or don’t. It’s something that, amazingly, cities know little about. If you’re going to subsidize a developer, for example, you should only do it when you know you can’t get the project you want done any other way. Alternatively, if you’re going to soak a developer for impact fees or other community benefits, you should do so only when you know it won’t kill a project you otherwise want. That’s why cities should have a lot of financial analysis capacity -- not just to balance their own budgets, but to understand whether developers are balancing their own budgets on the backs of the taxpayers. [italics added]

Criticism of the proposed Park Front subsidy has focused on it as an instance of "crony capitalism," a boodle favor for a former member of City Council and current executive with the Chamber of Commerce.

Commenting on the criticism, another person asked

Would another, outside developer, receive this same treatment? The project does seem to deserve some incentive, since that seems the norm for development that promises increased tax revenue and an improved downtown....[would] a project like this would receive similar treatment if an outside group were building it?

And the answer is probably yes, the same subsidy would be extended to any other developer who asked for it.

The issue here is almost certainly not that a former member of City Council is extracting special favors, but rather that we lack ways, and have not structured urban renewal incentives, to discriminate between valuable projects that truly need help to get off the ground, and projects that would happen anyway and just want the extra slush funding. Our application of urban renewal subsidies, as with enterprise zones and other tax incentives, is too crude and unnecessarily subsidizes too many projects that are already positioned for or have reasonable chances of success.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

As you're out and about, or if you have a view from above, look for intersections and lanes with intact zones of snow. Those are "sneckdowns," temporary curb extensions and lane narrowings caused by the snow, and evidence of surplus width or other area in the roadway.

The zones with snow could become bike lanes, wider sidewalks, pedestrian medians or other road space reallocated for users other than those in cars. They are evidence for ways we have overengineered and overdesigned roadways for car travel and too-high speeds.

The meeting is open to the public. Those who wish to provide comments are encouraged to sign up on the public comment sheet provided at the meeting. General guidelines: provide written summaries when possible and limit comments to three minutes. If you bring written summaries or other materials to the meeting, please provide the chairperson with a copy prior to your testimony.

Most of these items appear to be retrospective, reviews of past decisions and projects and planning, and it's not clear that OBPAC is in a position really to alter or improve them. Instead it looks like they are just getting updates. One of them, though, is more forward looking.

The financial damage of former Salem councilor Daniel Benjamin's resignation could cost the city as much as $17,000.

It seems like a better one might be something more like:

The yearly cost to service the proposed Salem River Crossing, which accomplished a major milestone Monday night, is estimated to take $45 million a year out of the local economy.

Even if you disagree with the deleterious nature of the SRC, isn't it obvious that the proposed $430 million project is much vaster and more costly than a $17,000 special election to right a set of wrongs? (Especially if the SRC is also a mistake, as so many of us believe.)

Monday, December 5, 2016

Friday morning in Silverton, one Salemite struck and killed another and then compounded his troubles by fleeing.

From the paper:

A North Salem man was arrested after a fatal hit-and-run crash near Silverton High School on Friday morning.

Dillon Van Diviner, 22, was driving on the 400 block of Grant Street when he hit a construction worker who was working on a driveway project of a new home, according to a statement released by Silverton Police Chief Jeff Fossholm. Van Diviner continued driving after hitting the construction worker, identified as Bradley Goad, 45, of West Salem. Goad was pronounced dead at the scene.

(It should be noted the paper's rhetoric is correct, that the human has agency here: None of this "the car left the road and hit the pedestrian" evasiveness. Humans are driving and required to maintain control. Even when it is not done with murderous intent, in the awful catastrophe a human remains the agent.)

Update, December 5th

Wow. Apparently "murderous intent" is in fact an issue here. From an update in the paper:

Moments before he struck and killed a West Salem man with his car, the suspect in Friday's fatal hit-and-run in Silverton allegedly smoked marijuana in his car and then intentionally sped toward the victim, officials said.

Dillon Van Diviner, 22, of Salem, was arrested on charges of murder, hit-and-run and DUI after he told police he purposely hit Bradley Goad in Silverton on Friday morning.

Van Diviner told police he ran over Goad because he feared Goad, a 45-year-old construction worker from West Salem, posed a danger to others. Van Diviner did not give any reason for this fear, other than an "intense overwhelming feeling," according to a probable cause statement filed in Marion County.

Wow. Just wow.

Since it appears to be a murder with a car as weapon and also probably a mental health matter, it is not so much a road safety matter. It's hard to say there is any amount of better road engineering or other safety changes that could prevent this. Vision Zero and other safety programming almost certainly has nothing further to offer.

Heartfelt condolences to the friends and family of Bradly Goad.

December 2016

Also over the weekend, you might have seen the piece about a driving school and failing a driving test while using a calculator for some basic math with the off-hand.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

On rereading the summary document of responses to public comment, there are still quite a number of items it seems possible to contest and on which more public debate, even a kind of adversarial and more robust litigation style of back-and-forth argument at Council, would be worthwhile. Matters are far from conclusively settled, and there has not been enough time to present and sift the evidence to make determinations possible about "a preponderance" on one side or the other of many sides of the issue.

One claim may be genuinely new, however, and is very much worth a little more investigation here.

I'm not sure I can prove this, but it has seemed that in the draft Environmental Impact Statement, and in the subsequent talk about funding that occurred in 2013-2014, there was an assumption that the bridge structure would be engineered to a mid-level quake standard, something like a 7.0 event. The DEIS on Geology is quite vague, and there is little or no explicit mention of these standards. A text search on the full chapter 2 on Alternatives doesn't turn up any instances of the word "seismic" or "earthquake."

It has seemed like the level of seismic reinforcement was a deliberate
fudge factor, sometimes used to allow for a lower cost estimate, other
times used to say that the bridge will be reinforced adequately.

It's hard to prove a negative, but you would think that the level of reinforcement, especially to a 9.0 standard, would have appeared somewhere, in one of these documents. That would be a thing to shout about, in fact. But it
was never spelled out that that meant exactly. The omission is telling.

Before BikeTown launched in Portland in July, Corvallis became the second community in Oregon to launch a public bikeshare system. Jackson County started its program in 2015.

Corvallis’ bikeshare program, Pedal Corvallis, rolled into town on June 30 thanks to a collaboration between several community partners, including the region’s Medicaid provider – the InterCommunity Health Network Coordinated Care Organization (IHN-CCO) – and the Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments (OCWCOG), a regional planning and service-delivery agency that covers Benton, Lincoln, and Linn Counties.

The close involvement of healthcare and the local MPO is remarkable. It would be interesting if Salem Health and SKATS/MWVCOG, or a similar group, emerged in Salem. (The Lund Report has more on it as a health initiative aimed at Medicaid clients.)

Station at Good Sam in Corvallis - via OCWCOG
(But is that convenient location?)

There are 6 stations and 35 bikes throughout town. Station locations are:

The bikes are equipped with front and rear lights, a basket, and a U -lock. Helmets are being provided free to a limited number of IHN-CCO members. The system also includes 2 trikes, to accommodate loads such as groceries or laundry, as well as for the benefit of participants who may have balance challenges. All Pedal Corvallis stations are located within two blocks of a Corvallis Transit System stop or closer.

An annual Pedal Corvallis membership costs $25, a month pass costs $10, and a 3-day pass costs $5. Trips up to 2 hours are free at all membership levels. The program is open to anyone age 18 and older, and membership is free for IHN-CCO members.

Corvallis of course has fareless transit and a very large population of college students. But the six stations are not very closely spaced, and really appear oriented towards the CCO members. It's not obvious that the stations are really very convenient for the general public. Do you go to a clinic first, traveling by bus or something, and then get on the bikeshare? The stations seem to be located at trip end or trip middle rather than trip start. As a system, distinct from it as any emblem of bikeyness or urbane cool, it doesn't appear all that functional. Maybe the integration with transit is key and better than it appears on the surface, even with stations not more than two blocks from a transit stop. But it just looks like it requires too much trip planning to use in an easy, convenient, frictionless way.

''The purpose of this book,'' [Jacobs] writes, ''is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and thus retain and further develop our living, functioning culture which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears. We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.''

In the course of this extremely sloppy book, Ms. Jacobs identifies ''five pillars of our culture'' that she says show ''ominous signs'' of decay...

Unfortunately Ms. Jacobs does not manage to make a plausible case for this thesis in her haphazard book. She does not convince the reader that North America is in danger of entering a Dark Age: either a big one like that following the collapse of the Roman Empire, or a smaller, slower decline. Nor does she persuade the reader that her ''five pillars'' incorporate all today's most pressing problems.

It was not uncommon at the time to say that Jacobs was at the end of her powers - she was nearing 90, somewhat infirm, perhaps all the praise had gone to her head. She had become a crank.

What a difference a little over a decade makes. Dark Age Ahead is poised at this exact moment for something of a critical reappraisal. It's not hard to see why.

At the top of the list is a current rendering finally of the project for a safe crossing on Commercial at Union Street.

From December 1st DAB meeting

A much earlier concept from 2013 or so

For comparison, here's an earlier concept from a few years back, and it is interesting to note the edits, which are mostly deletions:

No southbound bike lane on Commercial Street, either north or south of Union

Sharrows only on east side of Union Street, angle parking remains

A standard bike lane westbound on Union, west of Commercial

The corners on the west side of the intersection are more rounded and less squared off, which will make zoomy turns easier for those in cars

For east-west travel, the current design does not meet a standard for a "family-friendly" bikeway on Union Street. Kids and adults who bike infrequently will not likely feel comfortable on Union Street yet.

On one quick pass over it, a couple of things stood out. These mainly centered on why the haste and short time-line matters. (Maybe on subsequent passes other things will seem more important, but this was the first impression from scanning it.)

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The Breakfast Blog is about bicycling and the built environment here in Salem, focusing mostly on transportation but with significant servings of bike fun, land use, planning, and design. And other miscellaneous stuff.
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